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Electric 'Thinking Cap' Controls Learning Speed
An anonymous reader writes "Vanderbilt researchers say they've shown it's possible to selectively manipulate our ability to learn by applying a mild electrical current to the brain. Using an elastic headband that secured two electrodes conducted by saline-soaked sponges to the cheek and the crown of the head, the researchers applied 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to each subject. Depending on the direction of the current, subjects either learned more quickly, slower, or in the case of a sham current, with no change at all. The [paywalled] study appears in the current issue of the Journal of Neuroscience."
People are going to be lining up around the blockfor the "learn slower" electric charge.. if our society's obsession with alcohol is any indication.
...cause when we execute people by electrocution, they certainly do learn their lesson!
the day of mind-control brain caps that can enslave people is rapidly approaching...i've been talking about this for years and no one takes me seriously.
what happens when leaders of a country (say north korea) decide to REALLY eliminate all subversive ideas and just shoot signals into people's heads?
don't tell me it's not going to happen...even a cursory look at human history pretty much guarantees it will.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
Sigh. We need people to become more eager to _buy_ stuff, not to learn faster!
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
I wonder if this could be used to treat conditions like chronic fatigue. Those of us suffering from it are just about ready to attach electrodes and a 1.5V battery to our heads.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The electric current sets up a radio wave which is absorbed by the axon hillock. The radio wave is generated by the constant flux in the pathway of the electric current between the electrodes. Thus, we go from DC, to very weak irregular AC. The absorption at the Axon hillock alters the chemical reaction which is thermally controlled by the ions (voltage) across the membrane which can be thought of as a thermodynamic shock-absorber. This result is junk output from the neuron which when scaled to a process like learning introduces significant noise, thus slowing the rate at which learning occurs. The noticed increase in learning may be from insufficient data, acceleration of ions in a beneficial manner, or something more complex related to the waveform.
Interesting, but very old. The US military use a similar process on students on students and academics in foreign countries to retard their development. They have a nice big satellite setup that does away with the need for electrodes.
... will it work with my Lightning connector? ... will it drain my battery?
...but everyone knows that thinking caps run on lemons.
This is all rehashed stuff from the 1960s...
http://movies.disney.com/the-misadventures-of-merlin-jones
This seems analogous to grabbing a smartphone, connecting a wire to some metal part, plugging that wire directly into a 120 V AC source, and hoping that the smartphone works better afterwards. Yes, smartphones have electricity running through them, too, but what you're doing isn't like to be productive.
We're only going to be able to safely operate on the brain when we can stably reprogram individual neural networks. That's the model we're going to have to have of the brain. Something on the order of sophistication of microchip and circuit designers with a cadre of millions of neuroprogrammers. Brain programming might one day be the growth field. We can't have opinions of how the brain might work. We need to have facts about how the brain does work, in minute detail.
Anyone make the connection to the Harrison Bergeron film yet?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) Based on a Kurt Vonnegut story. Looks like we can all be forced down to average after all
Trans-cranial stimulation. Really? REALLY? Are we still in the 1950s?
So you're throwing DC at the brain in a VERY general area. The complexity of this is like making a potato battery when we really should be working with 32nm FET technology.
Let me know when they start having control of which neurons they're messing with. Until then, this is child's play.
I disagree. The inventors of the trebuchet had no idea about the Higgs, the inventors of the windmill didn't understand Bernoulli's work, and the first people to take Valerian root had no concept of biochemistry. We can use observed patterns to serve our needs without understanding the reasons for those patterns. Yes a lot of people died eating random plants, but there are a lot of us, and we learn quickly. My favorite part about engineering is using techniques to solve problems that no one understands yet. Its like magic. The best is when a true subject matter expert tells me "that shouldn't work!" and yet it does. Science always catches up and we are the better for it, but that is no reason to proceed with caution when we have so many people, and so much to learn. I would qualify this by saying test subjects should be informed and consenting.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
If you think of you brain as tangle mess of lines of dominoes of varying weights then a good analogy for how what this device does in your head emerges. This device lowers or raises the "firing" threshold of targeted neurons (depending on the direction of the current). In our domino analogy you can think of a thought as the entire wave of motion that is created by pushing one domino down. Applying tdcs is like lowering or raising the weight of a bunch of those dominoes so they are easier or harder to push over. Applying tdcs doesn't push dominoes over but it does make it so that waves of motion travel further through the entire structure when a domino is pushed. My personal unscientific hypothesis is that this creates more associations to information in your brain making it so you have multiple ways to access that information. Because you are not "firing" particular neurons the "targeting" can be very broad and still have a beneficial effect.
To use a programming analogy, we are applying sugar to associations to a particular piece of info.
Also you can build one of these devices for as little as 11 dollars with parts from radio shack. All it is is a constant current circuit that limits the amps to between .5 and 2.5 mA. and an optional capacitor between the electrodes to ramp said current up when you first turn the device on.
So, the Electric 'Thinking Cap' "study appears in the current issue".
I am shocked.
No brain, no pain.
This one goes to 11 !
The task in the study that the subjects had to learn is one specifically tailored to make use of the brain area stimulated. Whether this can help in, for example, memorizing the contents of a book remains to be seen.
Dr. Frankenstein
Lets hear it for Bruce Lee!!!
A true pioneer in electro-shocking oneself to improve performance!!!
Anyone think that you might be burning or damaging tiny portions of the brains wiring patterns?
Now that is a good idea.
It would be nice to try out with an alternative 2.4 GHz electric field.
But even this child's play get results. Lots of low hanging fruit
I couldn't believe my eyes when I read TFA (not the paywalled one).
Before we get any understanding of the function of our brain they already are messing it up with currents.
What kind of consequences are we willing to risk ? I mean, no matter how mild the electric current turn out to be, at the cell level (neuron level) that current is still a SHOCK to them.
How much stress must we put the neurons under ? What would happen to the neurons after repeat electric shock treatments ????
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Is there a tradeoff at work here? For instance, maybe they learn it faster, but less well. Drawing a comparison to training a neural net, you can tweak the parameters of the learning algorithm to make it converge faster, but that can hamper its ability to settle into the right configuration. Or perhaps, for this particular task, our default is too slow, and so it has room to be boosted, but that won't be true for other problems.
OH MY GOD!
<clutches pearls, monocle flies out into drink>
THINK OF THE INNOCENTS!!!!!
<MORAL PANIC>
We must not inform people, the benighted peasantry will do themselves harm. Quick, to the censorship machine, batman!
This electronic thinking cap seems like it will be slightly more pleasant than someone having "a little mental handicap radio in his ear" which emits "some sharp noise to keep people... from taking unfair advantage of their brains."
For those that wish for the singularity, sadly there's a 50-50 chance of it slipping into a dystopian singularity of forced equality or a professional sports analogy to "The Dark Fields". These possibilities appear to be nearly upon us and we don't even seem realize it... The spirit of Diana must be smiling... Maybe we should attempt to keep such eventualities at bay for a while by take those things out of our ears, oh wait, maybe that's too late for that ;^)
Helmholtz coil in a hat is what you really want when said and done and all the regions are better understood. .. setting A, polarity Y .. setting B, AC [cycle-time, intensity, loc_data, ...] ...
Want to learn a new physical skill
About to drive in hazard conditions
Hope the cancers and what not hold off till after puberty.